My main issue with games nowadays and how there's almost no immersion anymore. - Games

[QUOTE=Zinayzen;39648137]The real trick to immersion is no quick time events, no cutscenes that take place outside of the character's PoV, and a minimal HUD. Take Fallout: New Vegas for example (there are other options but this is the one that stands out for me). There are no quicktime events, the HUD is small and the menus make sense as a physical object, the Pip-Boy. There are no cutscenes at all, every conversation and piece of information that conveys the story happens directly in your face. on the other hand, of course, developers are trying to tell a story, and it's hard to tell a story with no cutscenes unless you're willing to accept that you're not just playing a game, but you're watching a story unfold that you're a part of. this tends to happen more with rpgs than action games, though.[/QUOTE] With all due respect, I would say that Bethesda games have notoriously poor immersion. They know how to be very pretty and lavish, but they do not really know how to actually suck you in.

[QUOTE=PieClock;39603946]I was playing Metro 2033 today and it's a great example of an immersible experience. For example they took their time and instead of building a map and objectives screen that takes you out of the game they had the character pull out a physical map, and look at it, and even took it to the point where if it was dark you could use the lighter to shine light on it. [t]http://puu.sh/23aQl[/t] It also did the thing where if your gas mask filter is running out you can look at your watch to find out how much time you've got left - but it also made the character breath more violently as your filter got worse and worse. A little imagination and a little more effort, like that on Metro's part, can bring a game a long way into being immersible and it should be done more.[/QUOTE] I see what you mean, but this isn't really what immersion is. things like this help to an extent, sure, but you can still be easily immersed into a game without having gimmicks like these what you're saying is that wii has more immersion than pc/xbox/ps3 because you actually have to move the controller around, except it doesn't because that requires much more conscious effort and, takes you more out of the game, than just smashing down buttons on a gamepad/keyboard/w/e

I also thing that new game are crap, only indies are good, big dev like ea only want money. Same for movies, best movies are before 1998. Economic are going down and it will get worse.

[QUOTE=alx12345;39649094]I also thing that new game are crap, only indies are good, big dev like ea only want money. Same for movies, best movies are before 1998. Economic are going down and it will get worse.[/QUOTE] It could be said that capitalism is incompatible with artistic endeavors in general, sooner or later turning them into enslaved utilities of income. The standard corporate profit seeking approach simply does not work with complex pieces of art, selling toilet paper is very different from selling videogames, or any similar works of human expression. The aforementioned mentality seems to do it regardless of whether it is inherently malicious, or merely trying to continue its progress, considering the line between the two being rather thin, with all of us being quite familiar with many roads to evil paved with good intentions. The world of art desperately needs a list of amendments which dictate the interaction between itself and the profit seeking world (governmental or corporate), for the purposes of keeping both sides happy, and preventing the "symbiosis" from resembling a prison cell construction in slow motion for the art side. While the desired implementation above is not guaranteed to be within close reach, we already have crowd funding, which is already an enormously better alternative. In short, people need to support THE CRAP out of every possible crowd funding variety, and ensure that it continues to evolve into a network of reliable systems, especially for art.

i thought this was gonna be some nostalgia rant and surprisingly it is. but that's not what's surprising about it, it's the fact that the guy is right... i don't mind markers. but in all fairness games would be cooler if instead of a marker you had something in your journal saying "talk to wendy in the main city trading area" it would force you to have to explore that area. eventually all of the looking around for shit gets the maps and locations of things burned into your skull then you got to a point where you don't even need a map to navigate the world anymore. just a compass. and something like that is kind of magical. i remember playing planetside. i played for at least 5 years. i knew pretty much every topography and all the strategies, blind spots, exits and entrances in the terrain you'd need to cross to get to a tower or base. and even if i didn't know or it was a new map i'd be able to gather up that information very quickly because i was simply pro at the game.

[QUOTE=FoodStuffs;39649698]i thought this was gonna be some nostalgia rant and surprisingly it is. but that's not what's surprising about it, it's the fact that the guy is right... i don't mind markers. but in all fairness games would be cooler if instead of a marker you had something in your journal saying "talk to wendy in the main city trading area" it would force you to have to explore that area. eventually all of the looking around for shit gets the maps and locations of things burned into your skull then you got to a point where you don't even need a map to navigate the world anymore. just a compass.[/QUOTE] There is nothing wrong with a traditional rant if it is done properly.

[QUOTE=genkaz92;39649720]There is nothing wrong with a traditional rant if it is done properly.[/QUOTE] well he makes a good point. look at my planetside example. or anyone who plays an online game regularly for a long time. you start to get that sense in game because you've been immersed for so long you sort of lose track of yourself and become fully immersed. and with online shooters you really do have to learn for yourself. there's no hand holding or anything. for pretty much everyone with online shooters at least in the beginning or when you're playing a game that plays differently than you've ever seen before, there's that initial period where you're going to do nothing but get owned. and you slowly learn from your mistakes hopefully and get better. the same goes for any online shooter or the like. you know all the maps really well because you've played them for so long. and you know the game so well that you're able to adapt to new maps quickly. when you get that kind of immersion in a game you get what i call a beautiful thing. just true immersion. when i say online shooters i'm talking about like counterstrike and shit. i've never played CoD, much. i guess halo is the same way but i only like to lan that.

[QUOTE=FoodStuffs;39649761]well he makes a good point. look at my planetside example. or anyone who plays an online game regularly for a long time. you start to get that sense in game because you've been immersed for so long you sort of lose track of yourself and become fully immersed. and with online shooters you really do have to learn for yourself. the same goes for any online shooter or the like. you know all the maps really well because you've played them for so long. and you know the game so well that you're able to adapt to new maps quickly. when you get that kind of immersion in a game you get what i call a beautiful thing. just true immersion. when i say online shooters i'm talking about like counterstrike and shit. i've never played CoD. i guess halo is the same way but i only like to lan that.[/QUOTE] That is a fantastic point, continuous, repeated gameplay definitely contributes to immersion. It quite simply keeps growing on you.

[QUOTE=MenteR;39602376]i understand having a big hud and all in games like halo where it's part of the character's armor interface. but in my opinion in games where the hud is something abstract that only displays health/armor/weapon it should be kept as minimal and unintrusive as possible.[/QUOTE] on the point of skyrim, you never need to use quest markers, and the characters, if you listen, do give enough information to do everything without having the markers. the only unfortunate part is the in-journal descriptions of these quests do not actually give you detailed information for the sake of aesthetics so it doesn't really work out. Conceptually, though, if you pay enough attention and force yourself not to use markers, you could get through it.

[QUOTE=RoadOfGirl;39651229]on the point of skyrim, you never need to use quest markers, and the characters, if you listen, do give enough information to do everything without having the markers. the only unfortunate part is the in-journal descriptions of these quests do not actually give you detailed information for the sake of aesthetics so it doesn't really work out. Conceptually, though, if you pay enough attention and force yourself not to use markers, you could get through it.[/QUOTE] Yeah, but every quest felt exactly the same and characters and factions felt bland.

This guy (op) is right on it. They've taken the manuals from the box and thrown them right in the middle of the game. I actually liked reading the manuals before playing games.

I loved Journey, as it just threw you into some desert with no idea what the fuck is happening. All you see is a glowing mountain in the distance, and you head towards it. No cutscene telling me a back story and tutorial (past a few need to know basics, but that was very very limited).

[QUOTE=FoodStuffs;39649761]well he makes a good point. look at my planetside example. or anyone who plays an online game regularly for a long time. you start to get that sense in game because you've been immersed for so long you sort of lose track of yourself and become fully immersed. and with online shooters you really do have to learn for yourself. there's no hand holding or anything. for pretty much everyone with online shooters at least in the beginning or when you're playing a game that plays differently than you've ever seen before, there's that initial period where you're going to do nothing but get owned. and you slowly learn from your mistakes hopefully and get better. the same goes for any online shooter or the like. you know all the maps really well because you've played them for so long. and you know the game so well that you're able to adapt to new maps quickly. when you get that kind of immersion in a game you get what i call a beautiful thing. just true immersion. when i say online shooters i'm talking about like counterstrike and shit. i've never played CoD, much. i guess halo is the same way but i only like to lan that.[/QUOTE] Speaking of knowing the maps - I have no idea why, but GTA: San Andreas (which, well, could be considered a pretty old game right now, seeing as it came out in 2004, which makes me feel old as well) is the only game I've ever managed to memorize the map of so well, I probably still could find my way around even though it's been over a year since the last time I played it. Have the same thing with Vice City, too, now that I think about it. Why did I bring this up? SA and VC are really, really well designed, and by that I mean that the areas in these games manage to be very distinct. When I play SA, I know whether I'm on Grove Street, in Downtown Santos, or somewhere out in the sticks. What I'm trying to say that separate areas in these games had a very distinct feel to them, partially thanks to good level design, and partially to the fact that at that time, colours other then gray and brown weren't taboo. (Yes, I know that LS on the PS2 version of the game was orange as hell, but I'm talking about the PC version) Compare, let's say, SA to GTA IV. I love GTA IV - I really do, it's one of my favourite games - but christ, I couldn't find my way around the city for shit. I simply had to depend on a map to know where to go. Why? The city was gray. The islands might've looked different, but, apart from some landmarks, everything just blended together since that's what different shades of brown/grey/what have you tend to do. Sure, it helped to reinforce the bleakness and the atmosphere of the game, but goddamn, some colour once in a while doesn't hurt. Plus, I really doubt the real New York looks like that. So, what I'm trying to say that colours are important, and sticking to the ever present nowadays gray and brown colour palette really hurts the players' immersion since a) it makes the player more likely to be lost and b) real world doesn't look like that, dammit. That doesn't only apply to sandbox games, either - I find it easier to find my way around a Quake III map than a modern FPS map, for example. Maybe it's just me? :v:

I'm coming rather late to this party, but I saw some interesting stuff on the last page about gaming in the 90s and the allure of games like System Shock, Marathon et al, which didn't hold your hand and immersed you by virtue of their complexity. My observation is that games could afford to do that in those days, because of physical manuals. If anyone remembers the manual for Fallout 1 that's a perfect example, it was a ring bound 2cm thick booklet and rather than being just a series of instructions for game mechanics it was presented as a vault overseers manual, complete with handwritten notation by the overseer who starts the main quest in-game. I'm not saying that games were more immersive because they came with a cloth map of the sword coast, or included a replica Septim, or the manual was 400 pages long. But there's definitely an element of impatience in modern gaming, which I'm guilty of myself, and we don't want to have to study anything in order to start playing anymore. Just a thought.

[QUOTE=MazerRackham;39652250]I'm coming rather late to this party, but I saw some interesting stuff on the last page about gaming in the 90s and the allure of games like System Shock, Marathon et al, which didn't hold your hand and immersed you by virtue of their complexity. My observation is that games could afford to do that in those days, because of physical manuals. If anyone remembers the manual for Fallout 1 that's a perfect example, it was a ring bound 2cm thick booklet and rather than being just a series of instructions for game mechanics it was presented as a vault overseers manual, complete with handwritten notation by the overseer who starts the main quest in-game. I'm not saying that games were more immersive because they came with a cloth map of the sword coast, or included a replica Septim, or the manual was 400 pages long. But there's definitely an element of impatience in modern gaming, which I'm guilty of myself, and we don't want to have to study anything in order to start playing anymore. Just a thought.[/QUOTE] You are not late to the party at all, it can go on for as long as we want to. If anything, it may just be getting started. The element of impatience is a very important one to consider, and may not necessarily be a negative one. Impatience has the capacity of encouraging better pacing, and greater reliance on smooth integration. It could also be argued that the older generations of gamers were not fans of the manuals either, and accepted it as a necessary evil at the time. Maybe the modern element of impatience is not a new one, but rather an awakened beast that has been there all along, realizing that there is now a better way. If we were to describe this in another way, if a games is complex enough to have a 400 page manual, then it should show that by organically educating the player, not making it separate from the main gameplay itself. The idea of a truly complex title gradually making the player learn its tricks throughout its duration, is a rather pleasant one, promoting a sense of perpetual novelty on top of the already existing gameplay.

i actually can figure out what island (and generally the part of the island) i'm on pretty easily in 4, i can actually get around without having to use the minimap much. but my point still stands. getting "pro" at a game to where you have everything down to your own little science is amazing. but i think the point here is that games are trying to force their little sciences against yours by not accommodating it and strickly providing only the means to do it their way. this can be solved however... say, actually interactive sequences in dead space with logical button and joystick presses and movements correlating to the fucking controls instead of "MASH OR DIE" a great example of a good use of quicktime events has to be metal gear rising revengance. while it still might have the flashy *PRESS THIS* bullshit on the screen, it still seems to do a good job most of the time of making the quicktime events actually interactive. for example, there's this sequence i just played which was fucking awesome. helicopters were destroying a bridge behind me and i had to actually run across a collapsing bridge. and it was by using only in-game controls. holding down what is basically the "freerun button" in the game and navigating the bridge. also there are various sequences that are triggered by "MASH BUTTTOOOMM" that are actually pretty cool and require skill AND use ingame controls to do so (harvesting brains). also dead space has some good examples of sort of quicktime events that aren't shit either, like the flying sequences whenever you're in space and you're hurdling at hundreds of miles an hour. also dead space wasn't the king of "MASH TO SURVIVE!" either. there are plenty of sequences that could be considered quicktime events where you, again, use actual ingame controls to get yourself out of a bind. the one i think about the most are the glowing tentacles that grab you in corridors in DS1 and the broken window safety you have to shoot (a bit more dumb than DS1's take on it) they need to make what goes on during those mashy sequences part of the actual game. in my opinion plastering buttons to mash on the center of the screen as a means of doing all this shit is so inorganic. if you can't make these button pressing things apart of actual gameplay instead of a shortcut for the developer, quicktime sequences would be fucking awesome feats of badassery, and you'd feel like it too. mostly because you didn't just mash a bunch of random buttons flashed at you to get there.

[QUOTE=genkaz92;39652399]You are not late to the party at all, it can go on for as long as we want to. If anything, it may just be getting started. The element of impatience is a very important one to consider, and may not necessarily be a negative one. Impatience has the capacity of encouraging better pacing, and greater reliance on smooth integration. It could also be argued that the older generations of gamers were not fans of the manuals either, and accepted it as a necessary evil at the time. Maybe the modern element of impatience is not a new one, but rather an awakened beast that has been there all along, realizing that there is now a better way. If we were to describe this in another way, if a games is complex enough to have a 400 page manual, then it should show that by organically educating the player, not making it separate from the main gameplay itself. The idea of a truly complex title gradually making the player learn its tricks throughout its duration, is a rather pleasant one, promoting a sense of perpetual novelty on top of the already existing gameplay.[/QUOTE] You're right that games [I]should[/I] become more intuitive over time, and more organic in the way they let us interact with them. Developments like recorded speech and FMV took the onus of teaching and providing back story away from external material like manuals, and the trend has always been towards user friendliness. This is a good thing, but makes for a challenge for future game developers. Immersion can very easily end up a casualty of practicality. As an extreme example, at some point the game has to explicitly state that Mouse 1 fires your weapon. But that's not the kind of thing an NPC can just say to you without breaking your immersion altogether, so in most cases it's just a text popup, but unless it's artfully done that can be pretty jarring as well. This was the strength of manuals, you used them to learn how to play the game, so the game was free to assume you knew what you were doing and just get on with being a universe you can inhabit. The only way around these basic instructions is simply to assume that if the player has purchased an FPS, they're presumably well aware that Mouse 1 will fire their weapon, and that Mouse 2 will likely aim down sights or activate secondary attacks, that shift is usually for running and ctrl is usually for crouching. This is shorthand, we all know it by now, but is it possible for developers to put that much faith in our abilities? I think that's what's behind the way we look at the video games of past generations. If felt more like the developers expected us to have to work a little harder, and weren't as concerned with saving our self esteem. Plus, if you can't learn by trial and error in a completely virtual world, where can you?

uhh, tutorial missions dude... i mean it's been mentioned how to do organic tutorial missions, like with dog and the gravity gun in HL2

I love games that have little to no cutscenes and just throw you into the gameplay. I find even games with simple stories become a million times more interesting when the story is divulged by the player finding things like logs or having the level design have visual representations of a previous event (knocked down walls, dead bodies, blood trails, etc.) I can really get pulled into a game world if I can look at an environment and tell something happened to it without someone telling me or something showing me "THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED"

i think half life 2 does that the best. although it's much more vague, but thusly more sinister and ominous. half life has to be the most organic series ever.

There are three notable games I can come up with that don't break immersion or do too much hand holding: 1. Fallout New Vegas. Tutorial takes 5 minutes after that you can do another tutorial quest or do whatever you want. Map objectives make sense because you have a pipboy, an electronic PDA like thing attached on your arm. 2. GTA 4. One of the last missions taught me how to jump on a moving car and climb on top of it. Basically the whole game keeps learning you new stuff while you play it, but it all comes so natural you hardly even realize it. 3. X3:TC. This is one of the games that takes it a bit too far. You can remotely command a fleet of ships but nowhere is an explanation of what to do. The tutorial is so flawed you can't even finish it without buying a weapon first when you start as a merchant. [editline]20th February 2013[/editline] [QUOTE=genkaz92;39648311]With all due respect, I would say that Bethesda games have notoriously poor immersion. They know how to be very pretty and lavish, but they do not really know how to actually suck you in.[/QUOTE] Yes, but the story of New Vegas was created by Obsidian. One of the great examples is when you kill this guy: [url]http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Cook-Cook[/url] After you kill him people that got raped or attacked by this guy will thank you and reward you. These things are not quest related but help to increase immersion because the world actually changes and knows about what happens. That's also why Fallout 4 is going to suck big time. To be honest, I like Skyrim, but if Bethesda continues this "follow the quest marker" mentality FO4 is going to be a waste of time.

I feel like games become immersive the more I let myself become immersed. Best example I can come up with is Skyrim. I made a decision to never abuse saves. So when I got arrested, I broke out of jail but my pick broke when I tried to get my gear back. So instead of just reloading and just trying again and being done with it right there, I decided to move on naked. This started a several-hour long adventure that I will not recount here. Point being, the game became infinitely more interesting the moment I decided to let it become interesting.

[QUOTE=Bloodshot12;39653077]I love games that have little to no cutscenes and just throw you into the gameplay. I find even games with simple stories become a million times more interesting when the story is divulged by the player finding things like logs or having the level design have visual representations of a previous event (knocked down walls, dead bodies, blood trails, etc.) I can really get pulled into a game world if I can look at an environment and tell something happened to it without someone telling me or something showing me "THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED"[/QUOTE] EXACTLY. i mean, also games that make you feel more and more immersed because they make you do stuff which makes you feel like you're there. the simple act of picking up a note in the middle of a mess and reading it makes the experience much more involving. i remember that one time in Bioshock where you got a recording in the table and when you start listening to it, you look around your surroundings and you can exactly imagine how your surroundings ended up that way.

[QUOTE=SGTNAPALM;39653983]I feel like games become immersive the more I let myself become immersed. Best example I can come up with is Skyrim. I made a decision to never abuse saves. So when I got arrested, I broke out of jail but my pick broke when I tried to get my gear back. So instead of just reloading and just trying again and being done with it right there, I decided to move on naked. This started a several-hour long adventure that I will not recount here. Point being, the game became infinitely more interesting the moment I decided to let it become interesting.[/QUOTE] That's what I like about Morrowind, you kill a guard and the main storyline becomes fucked from that point but you can still move on.

[QUOTE=MazerRackham;39652703]Another excellent post[/QUOTE] it is definitely a very good question, where do you draw the line between immersion and comfort? How do you balance the game to avoid plasticy detachment from one end, and cryptic obscurity from the other? These are the questions that must be asked when mixing the perfect gameplay cocktail. Half-Life 2 could be considered as a candidate for that, with it most probably being possible to improve the balance even further. I know that I have used this expression in the thread before, but there really is no such thing as perfection in this case, something can always be done better, and even if there is such a thing, it is important to have this mentality towards it.

To expand on my point some more, I feel like when I was a kid I was able to more easily allow myself to get lost in the games. I had more imagination, I was able to invent scenarios for myself. When I got older, that sort of fell out. I became more aware of what made up these games, and I started to look for more substance to sustain me. When I sort of "went back" and let myself re-imagine the way I played games and let myself get caught in the moment, I got some of that back. This begs the question, at least for me; did games stop being immersive, or did I just outgrow immersion?

Maybe the way you perceive things and your world view changed as you got older making it harder for you to become immersed in things

I would actually like to say that is not necessarily the case. I appear to be just as easily immersed in things as I was before, or with a very small difference. If anything, appreciating the underlying substance should not make you any less immersed whatsoever, if not more.

I want to thank the creator of this thread, and Zakkin with his post on page 2. If it weren't for them I wouldn't be replaying Metroid Prime again, which is an absolutely fantastic experience.

I've been very vocal about how I LOVE immersion, and I gotta agree with you. I'm running into fewer and fewer games that'll actually keep my eyes glued to my screen because I'm so into it.